Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver

In so many transformations I’ve advised, the same scene plays out. The CEO opens the all-hands meeting with conviction: “We are going to become more agile, more digital, more customer-obsessed.” The town hall ends, the slides go onto the intranet, and within a week, the senior team is back in the same operating rhythm as before: the same monthly reviews, the same dashboards, the same calendar dominated by the running of the existing business. The transformation lives in the deck—it does not live in the leaders’ personal calendars.